Navigation services provide a general framework for navigating to information on the internet. In the framework, resources of interest, such as web pages, are identified, in general, by a name and a keyword. The user or entity with whom the name is associated, or “name owner” for short, specifies the mapping from name+keyword combinations to resources, for instance by the uniform resource locator (URL) for the resource. The mappings are maintained by the navigation service in a directory that an application such as a browser can access both to look up the resource corresponding to a given name+keyword combination, and to obtain suggestions of name+keyword combinations that may be of interest.
Such navigation services provide an attractive alternative to Internet search, which is easy to use but not precise for discovering a specific, named resource. They also improve on standard URL navigation via the browser address bar, which, in contrast, is precise, but not necessarily easy to use because of the long and sometimes cryptic nature of the URLs employed in practice.